Project Details
Projekt
Coordination Funds
Applicant
Professorin Barbara Ercolano, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Astrophysics and Astronomy
Term
since 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 325594231
Since the 1992 discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a pulsar and three years later the Nobel Prize winning discovery of 51 Pegasi b, a hot Jupiter orbiting a Sun-like star, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered. Today we know of more than 4000 exoplanets with thousands more candidates waiting to be confirmed. With current missions delivering new planets and new missions in the near future aiming at characterising some of their basic properties and studying their atmospheres, the search for possibly life-bearing planets beyond Earth has come at the forefront of astrophysical research. While observations of exoplanets slowly evolve from the era of discovery to the era of characterisation, planet formation theories are now striving to make quantitative predictions to compare with the observations. To that aim there is an urgent need to better characterise the physical conditions and the evolution of the planet making material in the circumstellar disk. This has been the focus of our Research Unit for the past three years. Our work plan for the next phase largely builds upon the results from Phase 1, while also taking into account the new observations and the wider developments in the field at large. Our Phase 1 program1 focussed on observational and theoretical studies of transition disks, which in this second Phase is expanded more generally to disks with sub-structure. Substructure may be a tell-tale sign of planet formation, thus providing a key probe into the early stages of this process. The role of magnetic fields in the evolution of the disks has also become a more prominent question in the last three years, hinting at a paradigm change in our understanding of how angular momentum and thus matter is transported during the planet formation phase. This important development is also taken into account into our program for Phase 2. Through a close-knit collaboration amongst theorists and observers we will investigate the origin of sub-structure in disks as well as study the role of photoevaporative and magnetic winds in the evolution and final dispersal of planet making disks.
DFG Programme
Research Units
